“Bama Won’t Always Win!!!”

In this week’s magazine, I wrote about Paul Finebaum, a sports talk-radio host in Birmingham whose show has become the voice of college football in Alabama, and throughout much of the South. But Finebaum is merely the lead tenor among the often cacophonous chorus made up of his regular callers, whom he admits are the show’s stars. Many of them are capable of clear, coherent arguments. Others, less so. “I’ve never heard, even in Pentecostal worship services, the sort of excess of spirit you hear on the Paul Finebaum show,” Wayne Flynt, an emeritus professor of history at Auburn University, and football season-ticket holder, told me. “For someone not versed in football, they would probably describe it as speaking in tongues.” Clay Travis, a radio host in Nashville who occasionally appears on the show to battle with Finebaum’s callers, put it another way: “It’s basically an entertaining bar conversation with people that you’d never want to drink a beer with.”

That may be so, but after several months of listening to the show, I find myself still coming back to the bar, hoping that my favorite regulars stop by. Below are clips—warning, foul language ahead—from the show’s most prominent, and notorious, callers:

Legend is an Alabama fan who became notable on the show for claiming that he spent time in prison for murder. Here he is yelling at fans of Auburn University, Alabama’s chief rival, before the 2010 Iron Bowl, the annual game between the two schools:

On the subtler side is I-Man. His pitch and cadence rarely change, his volume rarely escalates—he sounds a bit like he’s stoned—and he has one of the show’s wider-ranging vocabularies. The clip below showcases his understated style (relative to the rest of the callers), as well as the topic that, second to football gossip, most drives the show: squabbles between callers. In this case, I-Man’s target is Legend:

Tammy is the show’s most prominent female caller. She also might be its loudest, regardless of gender. She’s an Auburn fan, and here she is despondent but unbowed in the wake of her team’s 49-0 loss to Alabama in this year’s Iron Bowl:

The show’s most famous caller is Harvey Updyke, an Alabama fan who called the show under the pseudonym Al from Dadeville to declare that he had poisoned two trees revered by Auburn fans. Today, the trees are dying, and Updyke is undergoing psychiatric evaluation in preparation for trial; he’s been charged with four felonies, two for each tree, and two misdemeanors, for desecrating venerated objects. This is his initial call:

Updyke appeared on the show several more times. My favorite moment came at the end of an hour-long conversation several months after the incident. It was Updyke’s attempt to explain himself:

Jim from Tuscaloosa is, by most accounts, the show’s best caller. That includes his own assessment: “I don’t want to brag, but I’ve been known to be the best caller on the show,” he told me multiple times. On several occasions, Jim called me personally to say that he thought the show had gone downhill, that the callers were no longer able to keep up with him, and that he planned to quit listening. (Usually, during these conversations, I could hear the show on in the background.) His calls are some of the most cogent on the show, and Finebaum told me that Jim was perhaps the only caller who could “totally flip a show on its head.” He can often talk for a full segment, sometimes as long as ten minutes, so it’s difficult to completely capture him in a short clip. Here’s a mix of several calls pulled together by Finebaum’s producers:

Charles Allen Head is the show’s resident poet. Here he is reciting verse about the former Arkansas coach Bobby Petrino, a married man who was fired after it was revealed that he was having an affair with a young woman whom he had gotten a job in the university athletic department. They were discovered after a motorcycle crash in which Petrino was the driver and the woman, Jessica Dorrell, was the passenger:

Smokey was a regular whose appearances weren’t especially noteworthy, until he decided to call from the hospital while having a heart attack:

As the show has become available on SiriusXM, and the Internet, more callers have come from outside Alabama. Darryl in Columbus, from Georgia, is fond of referring to himself as the “best damn caller on the best damn sports talk-radio show in America.” (At one point, Finebaum asked me, “Do you think there’s another show in America where more people think they’re the best caller?”) Here’s Darryl before the recent S.E.C. Championship game between Alabama and Georgia:

Robert from Waterloo also calls almost every day, from Iowa. He is a college-football fanatic in his thirties, and suffers from cerebral palsy. He is beloved on the show, and even the pricklier callers will take up for him whenever anyone dares to criticize him. Here’s a call from last fall, after Finebaum flew to Iowa with Tammy to visit Robert at his house. Note that he isn’t afraid to mix it up with other callers: around the forty-second mark he rejects his father’s recommendation that he simply say how wonderful the visit was, and proceeds to call Jim from Tuscaloosa “a load of crap”:

Shane from Centerpoint was one of the show’s premier callers—he phoned in at the same time each day—before he died of lung cancer last year. Finebaum gave the eulogy at his funeral. One of his more notable exchanges came at S.E.C. Media Days last year, when Finebaum surprised Shane by pulling Chris Vernon, a radio host Shane had been criticizing, onto the air. Note the outro advertising Shane’s call at the end:

Speaking of Shane, here’s the call in which Bobby from Homewood, a prominent but widely loathed caller—he is the only person to be permanently banned from the show—took pleasure in Shane’s lung cancer diagnosis. Bobby’s an Auburn fan; Shane liked Alabama:

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

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